The possibility of encouraging the growth of forests as a means of sequestering carbon dioxide has received considerable attention because of concerns about the threat of global climate change due to the greenhouse effect. Would this approach be as inexpensive as studies have suggested? We...

Policy makers and analysts are often faced with situations where it is unclear whether market-based instruments hold real promise of reducing costs, relative to conventional uniform standards. We develop analytic expressions that can be employed with modest amounts of information to estimate the...

The GHG cap-and-trade system is a key element of the policies designed to achieve California's ambitious goal of reducing GHG emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. The cap-and-trade program creates allowances necessary for regulatory compliance that become valuable because of their limited...

California's GHG cap-and-trade program is a key element of policies designed to achieve the goal of the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32) to reduce GHG emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020. Throughout the process of implementing its GHG cap-and-trade program, ARB has shown an...

Policy makers and policy analysts in the environmental realm are frequently faced with situations where it is unclear whether market-based instruments hold real promise of reducing costs, relative to conventional command-and-control approaches. We develop some simple rules-of-thumb that can be...

This paper, prepared for The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and the Law, provides a summary of the theory and the reality of economic-incentive approaches to environmental regulation. The paper begins with a derivation of the necessary and sufficient condition for a policy instrument to be...

This draft paper, intended for a general audience interested in environmental policy, has been prepared for the Next Generation Project at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. We examine what will be required if market-based environmental policy instruments are to become a major...

This article, prepared for the forthcoming 2nd edition of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, provides an overview of the economics of environmental policy. Included are the setting of goals and targets, notably the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, and the related method of assessment known as...

This article, prepared for the forthcoming 2nd edition of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, provides an overview of the economics of environmental policy. Included are the setting of goals and targets, notably the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, and the related method of assessment known as...

Some eighty years ago, economists first proposed the use of corrective taxes to internalize environmental and other externalities. Fifty years later, the portfolio of potential economic-incentive instruments was expanded to include quantity-based mechanisms -- tradeable permits. Thus,...